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History or Bunk?: 20 New Deal Murals Depicting American Indians

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'Osceola in Conference with Hernandez' by Eduard Buk Ulreich, from the original Post Office in Talahassee, Florida

From npm.si.edu: "The result of this attempt for peace near St. Augustine, and the ambush of Osceola, other head men, and about eighty warriors, was a forced walk to their imprisonment at Fort Marion in St. Augustine. Within 2 months, Osceola, then ill, was shipped to Fort Moultrie, S.C. where he died a natural death. Osceola was then decapitated by his attending army doctor, who possibly kept the head to study or as war booty. The present location of his head is unknown."

From npm.si.edu: "Note the fallen Indian behind [Wayne's] boots, positioned as the last barrier Wayne had to step beyond in order to open up the Northwest Territory to American settlers, confining the Shawnee, Delaware and Wyandot to only about 25% of their homeland. The Indian Nations who opposed Wayne were scattered throughout the country, and few are federally recognized."

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'Bimini Island' (also known as 'Aborigines') by Eduard Buk Ulreich, from original Talahassee, Florida, Post Office

From npm.si.edu: "Columbus’s greed for gold and pearls became a driving force for his intrusion into the Arawakan-speaking islands, which was followed by slavery, disease and genocide."

From npm.si.edu: "Pashofa is not simply food; it is a symbol of Chickasaw identity. The dish has been made throughout the history of the Chickasaw people. ... Government policies were even implemented restricting ceremonies in attempt to stifle Native cultural practices with the goal of forcing assimilation."

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'Early Indian Life on Analostan Island' by Auriel Bessemer, from the Arlington, Virginia Post Office

From npm.si.edu: "The people depicted on Analostan Island in Auriel Bessemer’s mural were likely not thoroughly researched, and thus may bear no realistic resemblance to Nacotchtank residents of the island. ... Additionally, the physical features of the six men around the fire are almost completely identical, depriving them of individuality and reality. Instead, they become monolithic representations of an idealized past."

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'Grand Council of 1842' by Walter Richard West Sr., Cheyenne Nation, from the Okemah, Oklahoma Post Office

From npm.si.edu: "Unlike many non-native representations of gatherings of American Indians, each person in the mural is unique in dress, posture, and even facial expression. This emphasis on individuality and personhood lends both dignity and agency to the subjects of this mural, avoiding generalizations."

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'Indian Bear Dance' by Boris Deutsch, from the Truth or Consequences, New Mexico Post Office

From npm.si.edu: "While the mural is no doubt artistically fascinating [and] appears to derive some inspiration from real documentation of a Bear Dance ... it feels oddly out of place in a town that was once home to a people who became prisoners of war, and never performed these Bear Dances at all."

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'Indians Cede the Land by' George Melville Smith, from the Park Ridge, Illinois Post Office

From npm.si.edu: "While the issue of relocating the 'noble savage' was a popular representation by the Government which enforced the Native Americans’ withdrawal, modern audiences with wider and more enlightened political and historic perspectives today can also appreciate that they were given little choice in their removal."

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'Indians Trading with the Half Moon' by Henry Schnakenberg, from the Fort Lee, New Jersey Post Office

From npm.si.edu: "The mural accurately shows an Indian man wearing a roach headdress of porcupine quills, rather than a feathered war bonnet of a Plains Indian."

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'John Eliot Speaks to the Natick Indians' by Hollis Holbrook, from the Natick, Massachusetts Post Office

From npm.si.edu: "Many among the Indians in Massachusetts today regard this mural as an important reminder of the cruel treatment of their forbearers."

From npm.si.edu: "What made Refregier's art so dangerously "modern" to his critics was precisely its dissent from official mythology. ... Textbooks and public art had long taught Californians that nature had fated the original inhabitants of their state to vanish before the superior races, and that natives carried little significance except as symbols of brutish humanity from which civilization had risen."

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'Signing of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek' by S. Douglass Crockwell, from the Macon, Mississippi Post Office

From npm.si.edu: "Of the 500 square miles of land allotted to Choctaw families under the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, not a single section has remained in Choctaw ownership."

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'Sir Walter Raleigh and First Landing on the North Carolina Shore' by Dean Cornwell from the Morganton, NC Post Office

From npm.si.edu: "It is clear that Cornwell took some degree of artistic license with history, as Sir Walter Raleigh never set foot on the North Carolina shore [but] merely financed and commissioned the expeditions that attempted to colonize Roanoke Island."

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'The Battle of Bushy Run' by T. Frank Olson and Robert L. Lepper, from the Jeannette, Pennsylvania Post Office

From npm.si.edu: "The back story of germ warfare [via smallpox blankets] adds a deeper layer of deceit and brutality to the history of the Battle of Bushy Run. The mural itself, depicting that fateful event, is a chaotic and brutal scene of screaming Indians with bayonets being run through their chests and heads."

From npm.si.edu: "Though the massacre at Bear River has not received the same level of publicity as other encounters such as the Wounded Knee massacre of Lakota in South Dakota, in 1890, it is regarded by many as the single worst massacre of Indian people in American history."

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'The Evolution of Corn' by Lowell Houser, from the Ames, Iowa Post Office

From npm.si.edu: "[This mural] could also be problematic in the false dichotomy it creates between American Indians and white Americans, equating one with past history and superstition, and the other with modern industry, science and reason. This tends to negate the reality that American Indian communities developed a Native science and have also adopted scientific understandings and methods for agriculture."

From npm.si.edu: "The forward-facing, brightly rendered couple is an expression of the white American ideal of the future; the shadowy American Indians are Ronnebeck’s expression of what America used to and will no longer be."

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'The Fur Traders' by Elizabeth Lochrie, from the St. Anthony, Idaho Post Office

From npm.si.edu: "Intermingling of the cultures wasn’t always positive as traders would abuse and prostitute Native women, and the traders often carried diseases the Indians were not immune to like small pox and influenza, decimating a large percentage of tribal populations. Over time traditional protocols and social structure were destroyed as tribal people became steadily influenced through trading and contact with non-Native cultures."

From npm.si.edu: "Turner is expressing in the mural that white American culture is progressively taking the place of American Indian culture. The rancher represents a current, 'advanced' method of life; the American Indian represents Turner’s idea of the American past."

History or Bunk?: 20 New Deal Murals Depicting American Indians

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The National Postal Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institute, has arranged an online exhibit in cooperation with the National Museum of the American Indian that spotlights and explains murals depicting Natives that were painted as part of the New Deal. Under the Section of Fine Arts, part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), artists, sculptors, and writers all over the United States were subsidized to create public works, and one of the most widespread legacies of this program is the countless murals that adorn the walls of U.S. Post Office buildings great and small. Indians at the Post Office includes works by and about Native Americans, and the depictions range from scenes of Native life to specific moments in history.

That history is of varying quality, of course -- telling "the Indian side of the story" in 1934 wasn't always a priority. One of the murals, "Indians Cede the Land," by George Melville Smith, shows Indians giving up their lands to an officer of the U.S. Cavalry with a smile and a handshake. Another, "The Scene Changes," by Ila McAfee Turner, seems to imply that forced removal of Indians and decimation of the buffalo population was a natural progression or even evolution. On the other hand, a number of the murals are by Native artists -- as one would expect, these paintings, informed by the artists' own experiences, give a more faithful depiction of Native culture.

Each of the paintings in the virtual exhibit is accompanied by a thorough, researched analysis that examines not only the composition but also the historical accuracy, calling out revisionism when it's present. While the paintings would be an incomplete or skewed history lesson if taken at face value, the essays clarify that these are not snapshots from U.S. history -- they are interpretations of it.

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ojibwe31

conspicuously absent is the infamous "Dangers of the Mail" mural in the old Postal Administration Building in Washington, DC, also known as the Ariel Rios Building. The headquarters of the EPA moved into it after renovations several years ago and an uproar occurred from women and native EPA employees. Many EPA Directors and a couple presidents have come and gone. The national native community and federal minority affinity groups, including the Society of American Indian Government Employees participated in a 106 process with the GSA, the owners of the building. In the end after years of debate, the GSA decided to leave the murals in place, despite the fact that even the family of the artist thought that it should not be there any longer. NMAI researcher Sandra Starr wrote about this and others in their magazine in the fall of 2010. Google for the outrageous images of naked women and marauding warriors.